One of the more common quotes we tend to see in medical history is the following by historians William Smith and John Van Ness Yates in History of New-York: from the first discovery to the year M.DCC.XXXII . . . (London, 1757, page 212):

In most modern writings on medical history, this quote symbolizes the biasness that exists most of the time on behalf of researchers and writers. The use of this quote tells us the writers have an agenda to their work, an agenda that existed from the moment they began their research. This implies a significant amount of cultural biasness exists in this writing, which offers to its readers a one-sided view of American medical history.

We also tend to find this form of cultural biasness elsewhere in the professional journals as well. The most traditional examples pertain to the history of American Indians and African/Afro-American slavery. For the American Indian, the common viewpoint was that the Indian was poor, lived in an unhealthy way, and needed to be acculturated–converted to Christianity. For the African immigrant or better stated–involuntarily imported slave– the common viewpoint is that we should not be overly judgmental of the African response to this fact of life during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, but to be very critical of those who initiated this form of trade today in our writings.

For each of these two types of historical events, there is an obvious right and wrong that has already defined by society before these projects began and well before their results were published. The same is not so true for medical history. Medical historians start with the assumption that the MD [they] are the best trained and taught in medicine, by a form of schooling that is the most accepted for of medical education according to “institutional standards”, these institutions of course being the medical schools supported and accredited by a society and/or board of highly trained professional members. These members in turn represent most correct way of thinking when it comes to the pursuit of medical knowledge. This means the MD who is so defined by their standards is always right, and everyone else is wrong.

The truth of the matter however is that such was rarely the case in regular medicine prior to the Civil War. If we are to accept a possible follow-up arguments to what has just been stated, the fact that at least “MD’s” were better trained, then we are left to confess that bleeding is better than the non-bleeding option, and that the use of mineral remedies resulting in numerous deaths per year according to the coroner reports published for the time, and that promoting the use of opiate derivatives, mercurials, arsenic, and a long list of many other highly toxic substances based on today’s standards, form a more correct way to treat a patient than to promote a physician who was more for diet and nutrition therapy, outside exercise activities, the use of less toxic non-mineral remedies, and the replacement of the lancet with the sweat bath. Obviously, the regular physician was not only way off in his/her definition of safe therapeutics, the association of these physicians that was then forming due to these belief became necessary because regular doctors were wrong and irregular doctors were right, at least in the eyes of the general public.

Therefore it is safe to say that regular MDs were a failing bunch of epidemiologists unable to define the causes for most disease, no more or no less than any other kind of physician out there. In contrast with this fairly judgmental statement is that regular MDs and the scientists supporting their cause were at times ahead of the irregular physicians when it came to making certain important discoveries in health, physiology, pathology and medicine. Setting these findings aside for the moment, it was not these finding that defined the profession, but more so the philosophy they helped physicians go on to define. It was these philosophy that were being argued more so between these different medical fields than the efficacy and success of the different manners of treatment. For this reason, in terms of the failing enterprise of regular medicine around 1845-1850, something had to be done politically, not logically, intellectually or scientifically, to make regular medicine the guiding force for United States medicine. This became the chief objective for physicians in all lines of medicine throughout the 1850s. The failures and successes of these various activities we find evidence for throughout the medical journals then being published. Unfortunately for regular doctors, ongoing failures and dangerous therapeutic practices got in the way of much of any success they had during this time with politics or science.

The above quote by Smith and Yates symbolizes much of the biasness that has and still exists in many of the reviews of medical history. Professional bias still gets in the way of many articles written about the contemporary issues that exist for “alternative”, “complementary” or “integrated” medicine. Doctors are still mostly learned in their traditional MD skills, and anything from novices to self-proclaimed experts in the other fields. They continue to profess their certainty about whatever judgments they make about non-allopathic medicine, and when fists come to shove on the main stage of this very public political battle, it is the MD profession that wins, not the patient, not the doctor, not the alternative doctor. A physician who criticizes homeopathy for example is like a doctor who told the American Indians that they would be better off practicing and learning the contemporary Euro-american medical practices for the time. “Tis Better to Bleed than to Prevent’ one might say with these particular mindsets.

So, I am willing to bet that the contemporary writers who utilize these old quotes probably don’t know who they are quoting. The Thomas Paine in me tells me they are quoting someone symbolic of their own stubbornness for certain beliefs they started with once they initiated their particular project. Historians Smith and Yates were very much colonial and anti-patriotic in nature, pre-Brit more than pro-American. This statement warns us about the ethnocentricity that tends to get in the way of most medical history writings. The writers today who quote Smith and Yates are in essence demonstrating to us that they are culturally biased in their approach, if they don’t hesitate for a moment to reflect on the truth behind these words.

The final evidence showing these past writers haven’t dome much research on their original sources appears when they never consider and state the limited training that even the most elite of the regular doctors go through. Those without the proper schooling or apprenticeship history were considered “quacks,” meaning that many of today’s most important US physicians were also quack as wells. A very good argument against Smith and Yates statement appears in Outlines of the history of medicine and the medical profession (JH Vail & Co., NY, 1889). The authors of this work, Johann Hermann Baas and Henry Ebenezer Handerson, wrote the following commentary on Smith and Yates’s writings (pp. 823-5 sorry for the poor scans the IT tech/Student Employment department provided):

Yale University not yet developed into a Medical School. The first Hon. MD was granted by Yale in 1720, to Daniel Turner, in exchange for a collection of books he donated (and for many was the author for. See Dr. Osborn section with Turner’s biography for more on this.)

Rutgers was originally affiliated with the New York school and its staff working as part of the New York medical school and professional medical journal publications team. Rutgers is reviewed at this point in history in association with the New York city school; its sphere of influence started as northern New Jersey into New York, and later extended southward towards Philadelphia.

[1824/5-6] REFORMED. New York, NY. REFORMED SCHOOL by physician who graduated from a NY medical school. Driven out of the city and state by a mob. Reopened a new school by invitation in Cincinnatti, Ohio, 1832.

1840. OH. BOTANICAL. Botanico-medical College of Cinncinati, OHIO. Org. 1840. In 1850 the name was changed to Physio[Physo]-medical College. Six months later this school merged with Cincinnatti Medical College? BOTANIC.

None??? Rutgers is not an early medical school. Chartered 1766 as Queens College; it may have offered medical classes and training, but the professors were affiliated more completely in their profession with New York City schools. Between 1785 and 1825, there were several affiliations tested with schools in NY and NJ, but none resulted in any medical school. On Nov 6, 1826, Dr. Hosack’s gave an Inaugural Discourse which he Delivered at the Opening of the Rutgers Medical School in the City of New York, formerly representing the fiscal academic start of a medical program, but mostly in association with King’s College, NYC. [See A history of the University of Pennsylvania, from its foundation to A. D. 1770 by Thomas Harrison Montgomery]

1824. Medical College of South Carolina, Charleston. Org. 1824–1839. REGULAR.

1833. Medical College of the State of South Carolina, Charleston. Org. 1833. REGULAR.

*Tennessee

1846. Botanic-medical College, Memphis, Tenn. Org. 1846–1860. Mixed history, between Regular and Botanic. Michael Gabbert, author of a history of Reformed Medicne in the Southern United States, suggests political problems had commenced around 1850. Articles published in 1850 in the Physiomedical Recorder (editor Alva Curtis, Illinois) confirm this. BOTANIC.